


bury me proper (or i’ll claw my way out)

by Ink_Beneath_Her_Fingernails



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Blanket Permission, Future Fic, No Dialogue, Podfic Welcome, Tim Drake-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25192900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ink_Beneath_Her_Fingernails/pseuds/Ink_Beneath_Her_Fingernails
Summary: Tim stands in the cave.He is the first, the last, the only.He doesn’t know why he does this anymore.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 49





	bury me proper (or i’ll claw my way out)

**Author's Note:**

> *slides in a month late with Starbucks and none of the fics I promised*
> 
> I don’t even know what this is tbh
> 
>  **TW** : Multiple mentions of off-screen character deaths, nothing graphic
> 
> **Please let me know if there are any other warnings you would like me to tag.**

Tim stands in the cave, where, for all its near-constant use, it might as well have been abandoned. All it's really missing is a layer of dust blanketing everything.

It’s quiet, too quiet. The only sounds are his echoing footsteps and the faint rustling of the bats above.

Tim stands in the cave.

He is alone now. Maybe he always has been.

There is no doubting it now, though.

Tim stands in the cave.

He looks at the row of display cases, half clothing catalog, half macabre memorial. It’s grown larger and longer every year and shown no signs of stopping.

Maybe it will, now.

Maybe with him.

But there will be no one there to take this suit from his body when he dies in it, with it, or from his locker when he is a second, a minute, a mile too far away to become Red Robin, and instead dies Tim Drake or exposed to the world.

It will sit there, and collect dust, and maybe so will he, and perhaps, one day, somewhere very far down the line, some investigator or future resident of the manor or ambitious cave diver will come across it all, and manage to get inside, where they will find rows upon rows of bloody tributes and by-then outdated technology, spoils of wars no one remembers anymore, victories history has long forgotten, and they will not know what any of it means.

They will find him, slumped at the computer console, or having fallen from one of the ledges with no gear to pull him back, or laid out in the med bay where there was no one to patch him up and he wasn’t able to do so himself. They will find him with his rotten flesh or dusty bones, and his old, old costume still wrapped around him like Gotham’s own personal tourniquet that long stopped working, and they still will not know what any of it means; not ever, not really.

Yes, the cases will stop now, he thinks.

Tim stands in the cave, and no one else stands with him.

His comm line is open, a habit from years and years ago that had never been drilled out of him as time passed, but it is silent.

There will be no growled orders, no witty banter, no awful puns, no hasty requests for backup.

There hasn’t been in a while, actually.

The cave has never been a quiet place, not in all the time he’s known it.

There are always machines whirring and reports being given and engine parts clanging and tests being run and spars happening and bets being placed and shouting matches cropping up.

Now there is not.

It’s near-silent. It’s _wrong_.

The cave is empty, with no more Bats and Birds alive to fill it.

Just him.

Only him.

Tim stands in the cave.

He is the first, the last, the only.

He doesn’t know why he does this anymore.

He should’ve stopped a long time ago.

He should’ve stopped after Cass, should’ve stopped after Kate, should’ve stopped after Alfred, should’ve stopped after Dick, after Duke, after Steph.

He definitely should’ve stopped after Bruce.

But then, none of them had.

The computer pings—a sound different from the one it makes when it’s finished running searches or tests, this is the one for when someone’s sent a message.

There’s only one place a message to the batcomputer could have come from, these days.

It’s not Oracle.

Oracle hasn’t sent anything in a long time.

(Oracle is dead, just like the rest of them.)

( _Babs_ is dead, how—why— _Babs isn’t supposed to be dead_.)

That left the Justice League.

Their absence from his city hasn’t really been enforced in a long time.

The League stays out of Gotham now because that was Bruce’s old rule ( _no metas in Gotham,_ no metas except Signal, no metas at all because Signal is _dead_ ), because nobody wants to go there anymore, because it’s a cesspool worse than ever with only one person left to defend it, because it’s both a reminder of bad things and the birthplace of them.

He doesn’t think they’ve had to break that old mandate since the Rowes joined them ( _since Cullen died scared and alone like too many of them had and Harper screamed for_ **_vengeance_ ** _and_ **_got it_ ** _at any cost, any cost, any cost_ **_including her_** ).

He’s not sure what they think of him. He’d barely known most of them, barely ever worked with them _before_ , because the Bats had each other more often than not, even when they didn’t like it, all the way up until they didn’t.

In the span of a decade, he’d gone from almost a nonentity to them, just another batarang in Batman’s belt should they need it, to the only hero (is that ever really what they were?) left in Gotham, the only one with the Batman’s resources, intel, methods.

Just ten years, and within them he’d gone from a virtual _unknown_ to _member_ and then skyrocketed all the way to Batman’s old status on the basis of need alone.

(And just how _fucked_ is that? The Bats have been around for—

Ever, it seems like, sometimes.

Before the League.

Before Superman began acting publicly, or Oliver Queen got shipwrecked, or Barry Allen got struck by lightning, or Green Lantern got his ring, the Batman was there.

Hell, some of the Bats and Birds have been acting in the vigilante sphere for _literally_ longer than some of the JLA members have even been _alive_ , even back then.

Nearly thirty years, maybe more depending on who you ask, and it took just ten for that legacy, for the brood at their pinnacle, the peak of their existence, the biggest and most unified, cohesive, experienced and skilled they’d ever been, to be absolutely torn to shreds.

Decades, gone in a fraction of the time, practically seconds.

Gotham would be ashamed.

Gotham is.

Gotham would be proud.

Gotham is.

Tim’s always hated Gotham just a little bit, anyway, for all that he loves it.

It’s not something any of the others, from their relatively normal, oh-so _kind_ in comparison cities, are able to understand.)

He became the only option left to turn to for someone to fill that position, as each partner and predecessor vanished in one way or another into Gotham’s concrete jungle and never came back.

They try not to actually call him out too much, because they know he has his hands full here (because he’s a reminder of all the other Bats they lost), but. Well. Sometimes things can’t always be put off, especially in their line of work.

(And the _League_. God.

That’s—

It’s—

They’re hard to deal with on the best of days, and not because of what one might think.

Beast Boy. Raven. Kid Flash. Impulse. Blue Beetle. Starfire. Cyborg. Abuse. Wonder Girl. Superboy. Zatanna. Aqualad. Miss Martian. Arsenal. Even Arsenal’s _clone_.

They’re—

They’re all there.

All the teen heroes, all the sidekicks, all the students, all the kids, practically more than he can count, certainly more than he can name—they’re _there_.

They all grew up.

Different suits, different tools, different methods, different names, maybe, but they’re _there_.

By some miracle, they all _lived_. Are _still living_.

And—

Is it the Bats, or just Gotham that kills people? (They say _Bats don’t kill_ , but then how come everyone who’s ever tried to take up the mantle of one is _dead_? Maybe _Bats don’t kill others_ but nobody ever said anything about _Bats killing each other_ or _Bats killing themselves_. And. There is—a distinct difference there, he thinks, from the way one would kill someone who is not a Bat, and the way the Bats kill their own. They don’t do it in the traditional sense. It’s through omission, through one little thing that slipped their mind, through deciding they can go in without backup _just this once_ , through too much distance and too little time, through too many words left unsaid, through the hand-me-down tradition of dying for the Mission, through the inescapable death warrant placed on their head the moment they slip on a mask or a cowl or a helmet or a hood for the first time.)

What did _they_ do wrong?

What did they do to deserve _this_?

This was not a death or two, not an anomalous tragedy, but a slow and steady massacre, each of them picked off through the years as Gotham, concrete monolith and festering pit of darkness that she was, demanded more and more be paid tribute to her, more be sacrificed, more blood watering the infertile land of this place.

Not a tragedy, but a massacre.

Not a massacre, but a tragedy.

He had never really been able to decide which it was, been able to separate which was which, say once and for all what had happened.

Tragedy. Massacre.

Massacre. Tragedy.

Some days the two seemed so far apart they were hardly on the same continent anymore, and some days he hardly remembers that there’s supposed to be a difference between them.

Whatever the case, the Bats are _gone._

Gotham took them.

She takes everything, eventually, and he has no doubt that one day she’ll take him, too, and will not be kind when she does.

Do the other heroes not have this? Do their cities not demand tribute? Not have them pay patronage in pounds of flesh and blood? Not rip away those few things, people, places that they thought they could get away with not _giving_?

It’s a novel thought.)

He is. Alone, now.

He knows they whisper where they think he won’t hear, knows they look at him with pity when his back is turned, knows that some of them think he should just get another sidekick, teammate, partner, whatever, to lighten the load, ease the pain, and wonder why he doesn’t. (Knows that he grew up with some of these people, that they knew him when he was still a barely teenaged Robin, and still can hardly look at this fully-fledged, capable and _adult_ Red Robin and not see the kid they watched turn into him, and all the ones that came before him, all the ones that came after.)

He doesn’t care. He’s not going to explain it to them.

Not when they can never understand _exactly_ what bringing someone else into this crusade with him now means. ( _JasonDamianCarrieTerryohthegooddieyoungandbloodyandGotham_ ** _grins_** _)_

It’s different, in Gotham, then it is in Metropolis or Central or National City or Blüdhaven or Star City or New York or Jump City or even San Francisco. It’s not as kind, not as sane. It doesn’t make the same mistakes, and doesn’t make sense in the same way.

He can’t just bring someone into this. The Bats have never just _brought_ someone into this.

They each figured it out for themselves, struggled and kicked and forced their way through the door and then kept struggling to stay there. The Mission did not fall into their laps, they fell into the Mission’s, and then grabbed it by the throat and refused to let go until they were being pried off with bloody fingers.

He can’t bring someone else into this, not when it’s already killed the rest of the Bats, not when he’s waiting on it to kill him, too, and that is something that the JLA will never be able to understand.

He wonders, sometimes, if ( _when_ ) he does die, if the League will do anything about it.

Some of them know where the cave is.

Will they come to investigate, if he stops answering their communications? If more and more time passes and there is no mention of him in the news? If none of their tech can pick him up? If Superboy—Superman—he runs with both these days—sometimes it’s easy to forget— _forget, you forget_ — _and you remember?_ —listens and listens and still can’t hear his heartbeat? His voice?

Will they come see if he is still alive? Will they clean up his body? Take care of the suit? Come up with a cover story? Try to find out what happened? Mourn? Seek vengeance?

Bury him proper?

Or will they simply realize one day that he is no longer responding, and write it off as the city taking what she’s owed, and leave it like that? 

The Last Bat, fallen, just like the others.

It’s not like he wouldn’t just be following in all the footsteps left behind for him.

It’s their legacy.

It’d be fitting.

But—no.

He wonders, yes, but he tries not to.

Entertaining these thoughts are useless; whatever the case, he won’t be around to see it happen.

All he can do is plan, and make notes, and come up with contingencies.

And if ( _when, whenwhenwhen_ ) he dies, those, at least, will be left behind for them to do with what they will.

The computer dings again, bringing him out of his thoughts and back to the cave. Where he stands. Alone.

Tim sighs—a world-weary, years-aged, bone-deep thing—and gets to work.

He has so much left to do.

**Author's Note:**

> • so this is a bit of a mess, but I wrote it on a plane with little to no sleep after a full day of travel, confusion and anxiety™, have barely edited it since, and (for now) have no intention of going back and fixing that bc I am a) lazy and b) exhausted and overwhelmed. so....please ignore the inconsistent tenses and all the other egregious mistakes. please.  
> • as you can probably tell this is really just some vague, half-imagined mess of a very sad and definitely-bad-for-Tim-but-things-could-be-so-much-worse-tbh future au and also an au in which most of the batkids somehow came to be operating in the same universe at relatively the same point in time...not any specific verse, really  
> • yes, I added ducks. don’t ask me why, I wouldn’t have an answer for you. iykyk and I sincerely hope none of you do, because that would be awkward, probably.
> 
> [come yell at me on tumblr :)](https://ink-beneath-her-fingernails.tumblr.com/)


End file.
